BONUS: Continuous Strategy Engineering—Beyond Waterfall Planning With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Strategy Professors Are Decades Behind

"The professors of strategy have no clue as to what Evo is. They are locked in decades ago, waterfall mode."

Tom's analysis is stark: the people teaching strategy in business schools haven't undergone the same agile transformation that software development experienced. They still think in terms of 5-year plans that get tested at the end—a guaranteed recipe for discovering failure too late. The alternative? Decompose any large strategy into weekly value delivery steps. And if you think that's impossible, ask any AI to do it for you—it will produce 52 reasonable weekly increments in about a minute.

Why OKRs Aren't Enough for Complex Systems

"If you're doing small-scale stuff that OKRs were designed for, like planning your personal work 14 days hence, OKRs are wonderful. If you're designing the air traffic control system for Europe, they're just too simple."

Tom distinguishes between tools appropriate for personal productivity and those needed for complex organizational strategy. OKRs force some thinking, which is good, but they weren't designed for—and have never been adapted to—large-scale systems engineering. His paper "What is Wrong with OKRs?" documents roughly 100 gaps between simple OKRs and what robust value requirements actually require.

Check out Tom Gilb's paper on what's wrong with OKR's and how to fix it. 

The Missing Alignment Layer

"We have no mental model for most of leadership about how you actually align people around clear vision."

Simon introduces the concept of a Hoshin-Kanri "sprinkler" system—imagine strategic clarity flowing from the top and misting over everyone's desk as alignment. Most organizations lack anything resembling this. They have Moses descending from expensive consultant retreats with tablets, but no continuous two-way flow of strategic information. The result? Teams work hard on things that don't matter while critical values go unaddressed.

About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in small, measurable steps. Today, we talk about Evo, the name Tom uses to describe his approach. Tom has worked with Dr. Deming and holds a certificate personally signed by him.

You can listen to Tom Gilb's previous episodes here. 

You can link with Tom Gilb on LinkedIn 

Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack.

And you can listen to Simon's previous episodes on the podcast here. 

You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.

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When the system fails, Black women build their own.

In this deeply moving guest episode, ‘Tine is joined by Naomi Reynolds, an Army veteran, author, and relentless advocate for women who’ve served. Naomi shares her story of surviving military sexual trauma, navigating life after service, and eventually finding her voice as a champion for other women veterans.

From fighting to get her VA benefits restored to creating HelpingVeteransThrive.com as a resource and refuge, Naomi’s journey is a masterclass in resilience. This episode explores mental health, family estrangement, and the reality of aging as a Black woman veteran who refuses to be silenced.

Whether you’ve served or not, Naomi’s story is a reminder that healing is possible, and purpose can be reclaimed at any stage of life.

Grab Naomi’s book, From Battle Scars to Benefits here: https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Scars-Benefits-Relentless-Strength/dp/B0FQDLYDRC

And if you’re a veteran looking for resources to heal and rise, visit HelpingVeteransThrive.com for tools, stories, and community.

#GettingBlackWomenPaid #GBWPPodcast #NaomiReynolds #VeteranAdvocacy #MentalHealthMatters #BlackWomenVeterans #HealingAfterTrauma #WomenWhoLead #MilitarySexualTrauma

Did you know you can WATCH these episodes on YouTube? Check out the Getting Black Women Paid YouTube channel here.

Check out 'Tine's book here: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome at Work

Connect with 'Tine at tinezekis.com

Follow us on social media:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube

For more information about the podcast, visit our website: www.GettingBlackWomenPaid.com/podcast

Want to be a guest? Apply here!

Be sure to follow us wherever you're listening now. And don't forget to share this podcast with the incredible Black women in your life, so we can continue Getting Black Women Paid!

We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this post, we focus on Lightning Tools.

In this brief discussion and demonstration, Brett Lonsdale, Founder and CEO at Lightning Tools, joins Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to explore the different products Lightning Tools have build with with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.

Lightning Tools has been part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for many years, and it’s great to see how they continue to evolve their solutions on top of the modern SharePoint platform. What really stood out is how they use SPFx not just as a development framework, but as a way to deliver business value - combining strong user experiences with the trust, security, and scalability of Microsoft 365.

During the demo, Brett shows four SPFx-based products that solve real challenges for customers every day:

• DeliverPoint – A permissions management solution that gives Site Owners clear visibility and control over who has access to what. With growing focus on Copilot and AI readiness, this kind of insight is key for ensuring organizations stay secure and compliant.
• Lightning Forms – A modern form designer for SharePoint lists that helps users create dynamic, polished forms without needing to write code. It’s a great example of how SPFx can make the SharePoint experience more intuitive and efficient.
• Social Squared – A discussion board solution for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint that encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing within a structured environment.
• Lightning Conductor – A rollup web part that aggregates and visualizes content from across SharePoint and Microsoft 365, giving users a clearer picture of what’s happening across their sites.

By building natively on SPFx, Lightning Tools ensures their apps stay aligned with Microsoft’s platform direction - taking advantage of integrated authentication, data security, and performance optimization.

Find out more about the Lightning Tools from following resources:

• Lightning Tools
• Lightning Tools in LinkedIn
• DeliverPoint
• Lightning Forms
• Social Squared
• Lightning Conductor

Microsoft 365 and SharePoint provide a great out of the box features, which can be extended and adjusted based on the user experience objectives using no-code, low-code, and pro-code options. This flexibility enables customers to configure and build unique and powerful experiences at Microsoft 365 for corporate communications and employee experience.

• Microsoft SharePoint
• SharePoint help & learning
• Intelligent intranet overview
• SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
• SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continue storing files in SharePoint.
• Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

Do you have offering for the SharePoint which end users can use and you would be interested in sharing your story with the ecosystem? Let us highlight your solution(s). We welcome all kinds of solutions which highlight the art of possible with SharePoint. Please fill in the following form to get us connected with you and we’ll get back to you on planning the right model together – https://aka.ms/sharepoint/partner/showcase.

Building engaging and exciting experiences with SharePoint, powered by AI! ✨

As a company that began with a mission to empower people by making computing accessible, it’s no surprise that we view our technical documentation as an important part of our products. To that end, we are powering up our documentation team. This year, we have added two new Documentation Specialists to our staff: Jeunese Payne, who comes from a psychology and UX background, and Kat Shann (that’s me — hello!), with 15 years’ experience as a technical author with a background in software.

We’re looking forward to making lots of additions and improvements to our documentation. One of the first improvements we are making is to how we manage our repositories. Our documentation is open source, located on GitHub in raspberrypi/documentation, and we license it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence — meaning you can take it, remix it, and translate it, as long as you give us credit for the original. Previously, we would build our documentation site directly from this repo; now we are moving our development work to a private internal repository and setting up raspberrypi/documentation to mirror it. 

Why are we making this change?

With the rapid pace of documentation updates and new product releases (we’re often working on documentation for several new products at once), maintaining multiple branches in our private repository, as well as all the rebasing and merge-conflicts that ensued, was becoming a bit unmanageable. Our new process allows us to spend more time writing quality documentation and less time wrangling with git! At the same time, our documentation gets to stay open source, and the public repository remains open for issues and pull requests from the community.

Community contributions — keep ’em coming!

We have a rich history of docs contributions from the Raspberry Pi community: almost 10% of the pull requests merged to the documentation repository in the last year came from you, not us. We want to keep those contributions flowing. Keep raising pull requests against our docs and letting us know what changes you’d like to see, including any mistakes that have slipped through the net. Our new process ensures that you’ll still get credit for your changes, whether we pull them in as a patch or use the co-author feature in GitHub.

Beyond these changes, the docs team is still growing; we’re planning to add another Documentation Specialist in the new year, preferably someone with a hardware background. If that sounds like you, check out the job listing on our website.

The post A new documentation team and a new documentation process appeared first on Raspberry Pi.